America’s got talent and I am the only one who is 100% of his rocker!
I don’t know if this was actually said by this person in exactly these words but in my experience it is true.
My beloved mother loves “American Idol” etc. and watches all variants of those shows. I keep showing her music documentaries and clips of great musicians being great artists. I keep telling my mother that she does not love music she loves game shows, which to her credit she admits.
Game shows are fun and I do watch them, but when I watched shows like “Deal or No Deal,” which starred “America’s Got Talent’s” Howie Mandel, and saw stupid people doing stupid things I did root for them to lose.
My dad often watches “Match Game,” which was fun, and “Family Feud,” but I will only watch them if they feature Richard Dawson, both the best “celebrity” participant (in skill and entertainment value) and the best game show host of all time.
She does love the song “Bohemian Rhapsody” though, which led to the “Freddie Mercury Intervention of 2017.”
Lots of videos were watched, but at the end my mother was indeed impressed with Freddie Mercury’s talent, but completely baffled by why “if Queen were so huge they didn’t just stay together and keep touring?” (which they actually sort of did).
My response was “You don’t just replace a Freddie Mercury.”
This got even more absurd when both of my parents made me watch a 13 year old mega-talent from “America’s Got Talent” singing “Hard to Handle.”
My father went to sleep, but idiot that I am, I made my mother watch lots of clips of Janice Joplin, who she was praised to the hilt for oddly, hysterically, and kind of creepily impersonating.
I’m so insane that I didn’t stop there. I also made her watch a lot of clips of Otis Redding including that song, and then I made her watch the Black Crowes playing that song. I almost was crazy enough to try to get her to watch LL Cool J using that song on MTV unplugged to do an epic version of “Mama Said Knock You Out.” Which would have been appropriate, but even I’m not that mad (in both senses of the word).
I don’t even really have any issues with talent contests. Elvis Presley entered as many as he possibly could even if he had to walk miles to get to them.
My issue was enthusiastically promoting clips of their winners when I had spent years searching for the best artists, who had spent years training to do it better. Sure that could have been a young Michael Jackson, who had been trained mercilessly by his father for years before he hit TV. The first concert I did see was the Jackson 5 in 1974, who I already loved. My grandmother was sick that night and couldn’t take me so my father did.
This had also happened in my teens when my father played me a version of “Rondo” by some random, female German organist, he had bought at some random show he had just attended in Germany. I, in turn, played my father Keith Emerson and the Nice performing “Rondo,” which was actually an update of Dave Brubeck’s “Blue Rondo a la Turk.” I liked Brubeck then and now, but I liked his saxophone player Paul Desmond better.
My father does get to like whatever he likes, I respect that, but what he continued to like was the German organist because that was what he discovered on his own. This does happen with most people, and I thought I had given up trying to potentially “widen” their horizons years ago when I failed with my niece, but the point of it is I am insane and continue to be.
He had also been on the same plane with the Stray Cats flying home from Germany (he thought they looked and were “crazy”) and years later I did try to show him a video of the Brian Setzer Orchestra playing the music he grew up on. He may have appreciated that a little.
This madness continued in 1993 when I tried to get him to watch the “Simpsons,” which he would not do, but did in fact almost immediately start watching “The Critic,” promoted as coming from the creators of the “Simpsons.”
This is probably a genetic thing. My grandfather would play Gin on his computer for hours but would not play with me explaining that I “might beat him,” which never would have happened because he had been playing Gin for money for years and I barely could play at all.
Sometimes the father’s is actually right at least on television.
Tonight, I again foolishly tried during dinner to get my dad, who loves nothing more than to watch old Westerns on TV, to watch the Alias Smith and Jones episode “Exit from Wickenburg.”
I told him that the show was based on “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, but was even cooler because the lead was also much like James Garner’s “Maverick” and was made by the same guy who did all of the “Rockford Files” episodes, which was his father’s favorite show (it was the only show he would watch in his later years). I told him about how the lead was also a hustler, con man and card mechanic, which was what made the episode so fun.
My dad, who was intent on watching “America’s Got Talent” after dinner with my mother, told me there had just been a great card magician on “America’s Got Talent.” I told him that he needed to see the best one, Ricky Jay.
I then told my dad, that no one on “America’s Got Talent” had any clue about card magic, but that Penn and Teller did and showed him a clip of someone fooling them on “Penn and Teller: Fool Us.”
My father did like Penn and Teller, mostly because they had been verified and approved by Las Vegas. Had they ever played Branson, Missouri (they may have), he would have liked them even better.
So I told him that I had seen Penn and Teller in San Francisco in the early ’90s before he had heard of them and had accidentally insulted Teller by showing my friend a picture on the wall at the Warfield of the Elvis Costello and the Attractions “Spinning Songbook” tour I had seen at the Riviera Theater in Chicago on October, 13th 1986 (The internet can be useful and it was the second best concert I ever attended).
Anyway, Teller is not as big as Penn Gillette in height and width at least, and I did not notice him until he mumbled, “Yep, Elvis Costello …” He was right next to me there to greet fans, I felt horrible and slunked away.
I showed my dad all of my books about card mechanics and hustlers, and showed him that the definitive book was “The Expert at the Card Table,” which came out in 1902 by S.W. Erdnase. I told him that was a fake name and no one had any idea who really wrote it. I did show him that the first name mentioned in the introduction to the edition I owned was in fact Ricky Jay.
Then to his credit, I got him to put off “America’s Got Talent” and watch the documentary “Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay.”
He mostly was willing to watch it because he wanted to steal it on his Amazon Fire TV Stick (most in life my father, bless him, loves gadgets).
My dad loves stealing movies, even horribly out of focus ones shot from a video camera by some guy in a theater if that means he can steal them first. Amusingly, he loves stealing movies more than watching them, but again to his credit one of my best friends has always worshiped this ability of his for years, and he has been able to do it since at least the early ’80s.
Technologically, my dad has always been quite astute and on the cusp. He worked at IBM at one point, and we always had the earliest video games and computers before anyone else did. I have never suggested technology to my father like I do movies and television shows. That would be silly.
I would never presume to tell my mother anything about cooking or quilting either.
So we did watch the Rickey Jay documentary and both my parents loved it.
It shows the whole history of card manipulation, and my dad was overjoyed to see old acts he remembered from his childhood. He did recognize that magicians were much like the Masons, who he is very excited to see me join, in that they guard their secrets and only show them to those who show rabid interest and the willingness to work hard to obtain that information.
Ricky Jay is Jewish just like we are. I pointed out that most of the artist’s names ended with the letter “i,” and my dad did know that Houdini was born Jewish, but I knew that he was born Eric Weiss and added that letter to the name of magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin as an homage.
There is one clip of Jay doing a “Three-Card Monte” trick, where Steve Martin bends one of the cards and is willing to bet Jay money that he can win, but can’t. Later there is another clip with Martin introducing Jay, which prompted my mother to wonder if Martin had been in on the previous gag (of course he was, but that didn’t diminish its execution or hilarity).
The film does point out that magicians are more ethical than real hustlers in that they take your money in appearance fees made by telling you that are going to deceive you. Them telling you this up front also makes accomplishing it harder.
My mother at some point said, “Wow look at your father! He is really enjoying this, he’s not falling asleep!”
I enjoyed that too.
Later my mother also said to me, “I’m always so impressed by the scope of your knowledge. We are mindless. We can’t just pull up this kind of stuff, which is why we watch ‘America’s Got Talent.’ I pointed out that they could pull this stuff up on nearly any artistic topic at any time, because all they had to do was ask me to do it, and I could in seconds.”
David Mamet, who features Ricky Jay in almost all of his movies and likely gets their scenarios from him, was of course in the documentary. I’m suddenly thinking that I should show them Mamet’s excellent “Spanish Prisoner,” which is an exquisitely complex movie about an exquisitely complex con. The movie stars Steve Martin and features Ricky Jay. I previously wanted to show them his “Homicide” about being Jewish, but it’s very hard to find.
When the documentary ended it was getting late but I did also show them these three Penn and Teller clips.
My dad, again to his credit, programmed my first television, which I got as a Bar Mitzvah present from my grandmother and it was my only TV set for 15 years. It was very hard to program at the time (tiny pegs that had to be twisted just right for every station), but he did add PBS to it telling me that there was good stuff on PBS, which Penn and Teller do mock here.
My parents loved them all, and it was getting later and my dad was still up. It had actually been a great night with them that I will cherish years later.
I do love my parents dearly. Say anything bad about them, and it will be the only time you will ever see me get violently angry.
But it was then that my father did say, “Can you hand me my Fire Stick so we can watch ‘America’s Got Talent?'”
This song originally appeared here and I only own it on vinyl.
I’m gonna bring you down to my size
One of these days I’m gonna make you fall
I’m gonna bring you down to my size
Smash your head against the wall.
And again, I am only raging against myself and not my parents or anyone else.
My mother loves clowns. My father purchased this painting by Jim Howle of Emmitt Kelley portraying “Weary Willie” to show his love for her.
No money needed to have been spent on it. Their love had already produced and spent a lot of money on the biggest and saddest clown of all. Me.
